Design Verification

LTE System Toolbox facilitates the process of testing an LTE design by providing a golden reference implementation. With its comprehensive set of transmitter, receiver, and channel model components, the system toolbox provides test vectors and metrics needed to verify each individual component of the transmitter or the receiver. The set of components includes:

The system toolbox provides a comprehensive specification of the time-frequency resource grid. The grid represents the framework that the LTE standard uses to organize data and multiplex various channels and signals before OFDM transmission on each antenna. By using the functions that generate and populate various elements of the grid, you can verify design correctness and catch placement and mapping mistakes in your implementations.

Downlink physical signals, their associated functions, and their locations on the resource grid. LTE System Toolbox enables you to place data within the grid for correct implementation of the LTE transceiver.

End-to-End Simulation

LTE System Toolbox enables you to model and simulate the physical layer of the LTE standard. With link-level simulations, you can obtain expected measures of performance, including throughput and block-error rate, and evaluate real implementations based on simulated measures. The system toolbox also enables better system planning by facilitating link-level simulations that provide some of the parameters needed to design a cell tower of a given geometry and propagation profile.

The set of supported functions for transmitter, receiver, and channel modeling operations includes:

LTE System Toolbox enables you to set up tests that measure the throughput performance of a physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) under conformance test conditions specified in the LTE standard document TS 36.101. With the system toolbox data structures, you can concisely express all system parameters. With the system toolbox functions, you can express all combinations of transmitter, channel model, and receiver operations. Using these tools for conformance and block error rate (BLER) testing, you can obtain link-level performance measures and verify compliance with standard specifications.

Conformance test results: throughput as a function of SNR as part of downlink TS 36.101 conformance testing. The system toolbox includes performance measure and metrics that let you verify compliance with standard specifications.

Signal Generation and Analysis

LTE System Toolbox provides a variety of time-domain signals, or waveforms, that you can use to test, measure, and verify various implementations. You can generate individual waveforms for all combinations of LTE transmitter parameters. Generated waveforms can be customized using MATLAB®, providing greater flexibility than the reference measurement channel (RMC) generation offered by hardware-based signal generators. You can then use each generated waveform to test and verify the accuracy and performance of software or hardware implementations of a receiver.

Waveforms generated by the system toolbox have the following features:

You can generate downlink test model waveforms as specified in LTE standard document TS 36.141. The system toolbox provides flexibility for generating these waveforms—it includes functions for programmatic use, and waveform generation tools with user interfaces for interactive use.

Waveforms generated by the system toolbox can be transmitted over the air using RF signal generators or supported software-defined radio (SDR) devices. Signals captured using RF signal analyzers or SDR devices can be analyzed and decoded in MATLAB with LTE System Toolbox functions. This hardware connectivity feature enables you to validate your designs by replacing simulated channels and impairments in your end-to-end model with live radio signals.

Signal Information Recovery

LTE System Toolbox provides functions for signal information recovery, including identification and source localization. These measurements are useful for obtaining information necessary to decode a signal or for ascertaining the location and identity of a mobile unit. For example, in an emergency, first responders can use these measurements to quickly locate the mobile unit in distress.

Signal information recovery measurements in the system toolbox include:

Signal recovery procedures

Cell identity search

Master information block (MIB) decoding

System information block type 1 (SIB1) recovery

Time difference of arrival (TDOA) positioning

The system toolbox provides a comprehensive set of receiver functions for modeling how a mobile unit (UE) communicates with the network. These functions enable you to perform UE cell-search procedures, obtain cell identities, and extract system information such as the master information block (MIB) and the system information block (SIB). The process involves acquiring slot and frame synchronization, demodulation, and decoding of the majority of the downlink channels.

By demodulating and decoding the MIB information, you can obtain essential parameters such as the system bandwidth. You can then extract additional system parameters, such as SIB1 that contains the public land mobile network (PLMN) identity and other scheduling information for SIBs other than SIB1. Obtaining these parameters is essential for handoff, mobile unit localization, and other system access and registration procedures.

Conformance Testing

LTE System Toolbox functionality is accurate and comprehensive, and it conforms to the LTE standard specification. Data structures and functions in the system toolbox comply with the supported 3GPP LTE standards. The system toolbox provides a comprehensive set of transmitter, channel model, and receiver operations for downlink (base station to mobile) and uplink (mobile to base station) transmissions.

LTE System Toolbox has been used in the industry since 2009. The accuracy of the system toolbox physical layer models has been verified by successfully exchanging digital baseband signals with commercial signal generator and analyzer instruments.

5G Library

The 5G library is a free, downloadable add-on for LTE System Toolbox. It provides functions and link-level reference designs that allow you to explore the behavior and performance of new 3GPP radio technologies. The library allows you to simulate the following:

Channel models, including tapped delay line (TDL) and clustered delay line (CDL) channel models as specified in 3GPP TR 38.900.

New radio waveforms, including candidate algorithms to improve spectral efficiency by limiting out-of-band emissions. These algorithms include:

Filtered OFDM (F-OFDM)

Windowed OFDM (W-OFDM)

Cyclic Prefix OFDM (CP-OFDM)

Link-level simulation reference design, enabling you to measure the throughput of a 5G link using the provided waveforms and channel models.

The 5G library builds on the infrastructure in LTE System Toolbox, so you can easily construct end-to-end simulations and measure the performance impact of different algorithms. You can modify the provided link-level reference design to evaluate your own receiver algorithms and experiment with other proposed 5G technologies.

Get Started

To use the 5G library, you must have the latest version of LTE System Toolbox. After you install, click Get Add-ons and select the 5G library.